The Roman Question | Page 4

the gates to revolution, and to take the road to Gaeta, where the
accommodation is none of the best. Don't let us leave home. I know the
house we live in; it is not new, but it will last longer than your
Holiness--provided no attempt is made to repair it. After us the deluge;

we've got no children!"
"All very true," replies the Pope.
"But the sovereign who is entreating me to do something, is an eldest
son of the Church. He has rendered us great services. He still protects
us constantly. What would become of us if he abandoned us?"
"Don't be alarmed," says the Cardinal. "I'll arrange the matter
diplomatically." And he sits down, and writes an invariable note, in a
diplomatically tortuous style, which may thus be summed up:--
"We want your soldiers, and not your advice, seeing that we are
infallible. If you were to show any symptom of doubting that
infallibility, and if you attempted to force anything upon us, even our
preservation, we would fold our wings around our countenances, we
would raise the palms of martyrdom, and we should become an object
of compassion to all the Catholics in the universe. You know we have
in your country forty thousand men who are at liberty to say everything,
and whom you pay with your own money to plead our cause. They
shall preach to your subjects, that you are tyrannizing over the Holy
Father, and we shall set your country in a blaze without appearing to
touch it."
CHAPTER II.
NECESSITY OF THE TEMPORAL POWER.
"For the Pontificate there is no independence but sovereignty itself.
Here is an interest of the highest order, which ought to silence the
particular interests of nations, even as in a State the public interest
silences individual interests."
These are not my words, but the words of M. Thiers: they occur in his
report to the Legislative Assembly, in October 1849. I have no doubt
this Father of the temporal Church expressed the wishes of one hundred
and thirty-nine millions of Catholics. It was all Catholicity which said
to 3,124,668 Italians, by the lips of the honourable reporter:

"Devote yourselves as one man. Our chief can only be venerable,
August, and independent, so long as he reigns despotically over you. If,
in an evil hour, he were to cease wearing a crown of gold; if you were
to contest his right to make and break laws; if you were to give up the
wholesome practice of laying at his feet that money which he disburses
for our edification and our glory, all the sovereigns of the universe
would look upon him as an inferior. Silence, then, the noisy chattering
of your individual interests."
I flatter myself that I am as fervent a Catholic as M. Thiers himself; and
were I bold enough to seek to refute him, I should do it in the name of
our common faith.
I grant you--this would be the tenor of my argument--that the Pope
ought to be independent. But could he not be so at a somewhat less cost?
Is it absolutely necessary that 3,124,668 men should sacrifice their
liberty, their security, and all that is most precious to them, in order to
secure the independence which makes us so happy and so proud? The
Apostles were certainly independent at a cheaper rate, for they did
nobody harm. The most independent of men is he who has nothing to
lose. He pursues his own path, without troubling himself about powers
and principalities, for the simple reason that the conqueror most bent on
acquisition can take nothing from him.
The greatest conquests of Catholicism were made at a time when the
Pope was not a ruler. Since he has become a king, you may measure the
territory won from the Church by inches.
The earliest Popes, who were not kings, had no budgets. Consequently
they had no annual deficits to make up. Consequently they were not
obliged to borrow millions of M. de Rothschild. Consequently they
were more independent than the crowned Popes of more recent times.
Ever since the spiritual and the temporal have been joined, like two
Siamese powers, the most August of the two has necessarily lost its
independence. Every day, or nearly so, the Sovereign Pontiff finds
himself called upon to choose between the general interests of the
Church, and the private interests of his crown. Think you he is

sufficiently estranged from the things of this world to sacrifice
heroically the earth, which is near, to the Heaven, which is remote?
Besides, we have history to help us. I might, if I chose, refer to certain
bad Popes who were capable of selling the dogma of the Holy Trinity
for half-a-dozen leagues of territory; but it would be hardly fair to